Keeping track on diet

guynaruto9

hi so I been tracking my calories and going to gym for 34 days straight (rest days I will walk 30 min) but know I have hard time getting more stricter with my diet. Sum days I can go easily by in deficit but some days I have real bad time with cravings due to emotions with hunger pengs. Is it bad I give in temptation ? And how do I stick to diet without an ego

AnnPT77

Is it bad when you give into temptation?

This isn't some kind of moral battle between good and evil. It's just a decision, and all decisions have consequences. If we make a decision, but don't accept the consequences - both good and bad consequences - that's not very realistic, is it?

In retrospect, a lot of the reason I gained weight was that I decided that pleasure in the moment - from eating more tasty food - was more important to me than my future self's health and well-being.

That was dumb of me, I now think.

Cutting back on my calorie intake - though not necessarily eating less food volume - was needed in order to let my future self have those health and well-being benefits.

For me, weight loss was significantly about owning the consequences of my own decisions, and learning to eat in a way that gave me the maximum of current pleasure that I could achieve without risking my future health and well being. As a consequence, I became lighter, healthier, in less pain, probably with a longer lifespan and certainly a longer healthspan, and with a general overall improved sense of well-being. To me, that's proven more than worth the effort.

YMMV on those things, I don't know.

One thing I'm pretty sure is true for you, because it's true for all of us: Anytime you eat less than your actual current maintenance calories, you'll lose weight. If you have a calorie goal for aggressive weight loss, temptation and cravings are likely to loom larger, be more frequent.

If you give in to temptation, what happens? It matters what "give into temptation" means. If you eat at maintenance calories, and do that consistently, you're stuck at your current weight. If you eat over your maintenance calories consistently, you gain weight. If you eat above your weight loss calorie goal but under your maintenance calories, you lose weight . . . you just lose weight more slowly than you would if you stuck strictly and consistently to your calorie goal.

To be clear, what I'm talking about is average calories eaten. If you give into temptation only quite occasionally, stick to your eating goals most of the times, and your average calories are less than maintenance calories, you'll still lose weight. In that sense, it's just arithmetic, not a magic spell where only perfect compliance has helpful results.

It's not the giving in to temptation that matters, really; it's whether your over-goal eating leads you to eat persistently over maintenance calories. If you choose to eat at/above your maintenance calories consistently, you won't achieve weight loss. That would be a decision that eating that amount of your comforting, tasty food is more important to you than achieving your weight goals. It's 100% your choice which one is more important.

Best wishes: In my experience, the quality of life improvement from reaching a healthy weight is more than worth the effort it took to accomplish.